08/27/2026
On August 27, 2018, 25-year-old Joshua Wayne Harvey died after spending three days unconscious in a Tulsa hospital following an encounter with Tulsa police.
Three days earlier, officers had responded to reports that Joshua was behaving erratically in downtown Tulsa. He ran from officers and eventually entered a bank after breaking through a glass door. Joshua was unarmed, and his family later shared that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
According to the Tulsa Police Department’s own use-of-force report, officers deployed their Tasers against Joshua 27 times in approximately three minutes while attempting to restrain him. After he was handcuffed, officers held him facedown, and his family later alleged that he struggled to breathe and repeatedly asked for help before becoming unconscious.
The medical examiner attributed Joshua’s death to cardiovascular disease complicated by methamphetamine use and physical exertion. Human Rights Watch later reported that there was not enough information to determine whether police actions were the direct cause of his death, while also finding that the officers’ actions may have increased the risk of harm he faced.
Joshua’s death also came amid a documented racial disparity in Tulsa policing. In 2018, Tulsa’s inaugural Equality Indicators report found that Black residents experienced officer use of force at a rate of 2.6 incidents per 1,000 residents, compared with 1.0 for white residents and 0.5 for Hispanic or Latinx residents. Tulsa has continued to document racial disparities in police use of force in the years since.
Joshua’s family later pursued a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging excessive force and failures in his medical treatment, and in 2022, the City of Tulsa authorized a $175,000 payment connected to the case.
Eight years after Joshua’s death, his story remains part of a much longer Tulsa history that requires us to examine the relationship between race, policing, public safety and government accountability.
